Ask Me Anything!

I’ve been developer for nearly 4 months now, and it baffles me how hard it is to digest anything I’ve done into something I feel is post-worthy. It’s the same situation with presentations for Boulder Ruby Meetup, I just don’t know what to talk about. Don’t get me wrong, I have leveled up more in the last three months than I could have even dreamed of, but I’m just not sure how to filter that into something to talk about. I’m thinking I might do a ‘brain dump’ post, where I literally just list off all the things I can think of that I’ve come across, or gotten help with since I started, but I’m still working on that list.

One thing I have been doing in the past few months is giving advice. I’ve had people get in touch with me about various things, but mostly asking specific questions about my path from non-dev to student to paid dev. I got to where I am because I asked a ton of questions to just about anyone I could get in touch with, so I am always more than happy to do the same to anyone who contacts me. With that said, I want to be more proactive about helping others and put it out into the whole of the interwebs that I’m open to any questions from anyone about my experience up to this point. Im not claiming to be any kind of expert, but ask away and I’ll do my best to respond with helpful input.

Yes, I’m serious. To be honest, just about everyone I’ve ever encountered in this field would probably do the same, but few advertise it. And I know for a fact that a lot of people wouldn’t think to ‘cold-call’ someone they didn’t know with questions, so I’m opening the door. As a student I followed up on a strangers’ Twitter post where he offered a half hour of his time to anyone, and it helped steer me in a better direction when I was getting a bit off course with school.

This isn’t a one-way street, the interactions will help me determine what the community as a whole would like to hear more about, which will help guide me as to where I should focus future posts and presentations. And the flipside is, if I get questions I don’t have immediate answers to, that will force me to dig around and find those answers, helping with the ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ scenario.

For the time being, let’s start off with emails. Ill try to get back to them within a few days, but who knows what might happen, so I’ll say with certainty within a week. For the sake of my spam box I’m not going to link my email, but a message sent to noelworden(@)gmail will get to me.